Firefox's share at 19.17%
June 23rd 2008
Quoting Net Applications data, ComputerWorld (Kenya) reports that less than one-quarter of last week's 8.3-million Firefox 3 downloads have come from switchers. Thereupon, the browser's overall market share ended last week at 19.17%, up from the 18.41% share it had at the end of May.
"We do show Firefox going up, but I want to caution that it may be artificially high," said Vince Vizzaccaro, executive vice president, marketing, Net Applications, adding that the way the web metrics company tallies unique visitors, it's possible some people may have been double counted last week.
For example, a user who visited a monitored site with Firefox 2.0, for example, then downloaded and installed Firefox 3.0 and revisited the same site that day, would be counted twice, Vizzaccaro said.
Most of that gain came at the expense of Internet Explorer, but Safari also also dipped last week. IE was down 0.8% from May's tally, to 72.95%, said Vizzaccaro, while Safari was off 0.1%, to 6.15%. About one quarter of Mac users also use some flavor of Firefox, so few fans of fairer platform saw the release of FF3 as an occasion to change their browsing preferences.
Opera Software, which recently unveiled v9.5 of its flagship browser, was up slightly last week to 0.75% from May's 0.71%.
With Firefox adding under 1% share in the week since v3.0 was released and, with Vizzaccaro's caution about double counting in mind, the possibility of the browser hitting and then passing 20% seems somewhat remote.
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